Shopify's Most Relevant Collection Sort, Explained: What It Does and When to Change It

Most relevant is now the default sort for new Shopify collections. Here is what Shopify says it does, what it doesn't document, how it compares with Best selling and manual sorting, how to test it fairly, and when to choose something else.

If you've created a Shopify collection recently, its sort order may have been set to Most relevant without you choosing it. Shopify's Help Center lists Most relevant as the default for new collections and describes it as sorting based on sales performance. That is a sensible default for a store that never thinks about collection order. It is also a black box: Shopify doesn't publish what goes into it, and it will change as Shopify tests improvements. This guide sets out what is known, what isn't, how Most relevant compares with the other options, and how to decide, collection by collection, whether to keep it.

What Shopify says Most relevant does

Here is everything Shopify has said publicly, and where it said it:

• Shopify's Help Center lists Most relevant among the collection sort options, as the default for new collections, sorting based on sales performance.
• Shopify's developer changelog of 15 April 2026 added a MOST_RELEVANT value to the CollectionSortOrder enum in the GraphQL Admin API, from API version 2026-07. That is how apps can read or set it.
• On Shopify's developer community in April 2026, a Shopify staff member said that new collections default to Most relevant, that existing collections are not changed, and that the option was rolling out gradually. They described it as using relevancy signals to surface products that are performing well within a collection, and said the algorithm will be refined over time as Shopify tests improvements.

Two practical points follow. First, your older collections keep whatever sort they had. Most relevant only appears on them if someone chooses it. Second, because it rolled out gradually, two stores, or two people comparing notes, may not have seen it at the same time.

What Shopify doesn't document

Shopify hasn't published the details of how Most relevant decides the order, and we won't guess on its behalf. If you're deciding whether to rely on it, these are the open questions to keep in mind:

• Which signals count, and how much. 'Sales performance' and 'relevancy signals' could mean orders, revenue, units, views or something else, in any mix.
• Over what period. A recent window favours what's selling now; a long one favours long-time bestsellers.
• Whether stock is considered. A sold-out product with a strong sales history could still rank high.
• How new products are treated. A product with no sales yet has nothing for a sales signal to measure.
• How often the order updates, and whether it will rank the same products differently after Shopify refines it.

None of this makes Most relevant bad. It means you can't predict or explain the order it produces, so the way to judge it is to look at the result on your own collections.

Most relevant vs Best selling vs manual

The Help Center describes each option you can choose in a collection's Default sort drop-down:

• Most relevant: the default for new collections, based on sales performance, with the details undocumented.
• Best selling: sorted by the all-time number of orders that include the product. Where there are no sales, products sort from newest to oldest. All-time is the key word. A product that sold steadily two years ago can outrank this month's best performer.
• Alphabetical, A to Z or Z to A, by product title.
• Price, highest or lowest first, using base prices rather than prices set for Markets or B2B catalogs.
• Date, oldest or newest first, by when the product was created.
• Manually: you, or an app, set the exact order. In Shopify's Liquid documentation, this order is what shoppers see as Featured in the theme's sort menu.

None of the automatic options uses product views, add-to-carts, conversion rate, stock levels or margin. If you want any of those to decide the order, you need a manual order, set by hand or by an app.

How to check or change a collection's sort

1. 1In Shopify admin, go to Products > Collections and open the collection.
2. 2Find the Collection items section. The Default sort drop-down shows the current sort order.
3. 3Choose a different option to change it. If you choose Manually, you can drag products into place, or use the Move options to send a product to the beginning, the end or a specific position.
4. 4Save. On the Shopify mobile app, tap View all in the Collection items section and use Default sort order.

How to test Most relevant fairly

The useful question isn't whether Most relevant is good in general. It's whether it puts the right products first on a particular collection. You can answer that in half an hour:

1. 1Pick one important collection and write down the first eight products under Most relevant. On a four-column grid that is the first two rows on a laptop, and on a two-column phone grid the first four.
2. 2Pull your own numbers for the last 30 days for every product in the collection: orders, revenue and, if you have them, product views.
3. 3Compare. Are your top sellers of the last 30 days in the first eight? Is anything in the first eight sold out, or nearly? Are any of the first eight products you'd never choose to lead with?
4. 4Look for your newest products. If they're buried, decide whether that's what you want during a launch.
5. 5Decide on that collection alone, then repeat for the next one. The answer can differ between a long-running core collection and a seasonal one.

Illustration only, not a real store: on a festive gifting collection, the first row under Most relevant might be strong all-year sellers while this season's gift sets sit on row five. Nothing is wrong with the sort; it simply can't know that the season has changed what shoppers came for. That is the kind of mismatch the comparison above shows quickly.

When to keep Most relevant

• On collections nobody has time to manage, where a sales-based order beats a random or alphabetical one.
• On new stores and new collections, as a better starting point than creation date.
• When your test shows the first rows match what you'd have chosen yourself.

When to choose something else

• When you need to explain the order: to a client, a merchandising team or yourself after a bad week.
• When stock matters. If sold-out or nearly sold-out products keep reaching the first rows, you need an order that checks stock.
• When the order has to follow a plan, such as a launch, a sale, a campaign landing page or a festive gifting push.
• When views, add-to-carts, conversion rate or margin should count. None of the automatic sorts uses them.
• When specific products have to hold specific places, such as a hero product in position one.

What Most relevant means for apps that sort collections

A collection has one sort order at a time. Apps that set a collection's order write a manual order, so a collection sorted by an app shows Manually in the Default sort drop-down. If someone switches it to Most relevant, Shopify's order replaces the app's on the storefront. If an app later syncs again, the collection goes back to manual.

SellRank, the collection sorting app we build at LeelaRam Technologies, works this way on purpose. It ranks products by measured performance, such as views and add-to-carts from its own pixel, orders, revenue, conversion rate or profit, and writes the result into Shopify's own manual sort. Before you sync, the live preview shows the exact order product by product, with the reason for each placement, so the order is never a black box. A check every two hours compares the live Shopify order with the one SellRank pushed, and flags the collection if a person, a theme or another app has changed it. One click re-syncs it.

Install SellRank free from the Shopify App Store at apps.shopify.com/sellrank-collection-sort. The free plan covers one collection with the full editor, live preview and one live sync, which is enough to test it against Most relevant on the collection that matters most.